Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Watch out: I use "I" 54 times in this post, so this will be boring if you, like me, aren't interested in hearing me talk about myself.

When I was in high school, I was so shy that I couldn't talk to almost anyone outside my family. Through a last-ditch effort when I went to college, I got better. I then got lucky and succeeded at a lot of things I tried after that, which rescued my general confidence, and I did some focused practice, rejection therapy, public speaking, and Beeminding to fix my social confidence.

But even though I'm no longer afraid to try, that doesn't mean that I can do it well. I still feel that I'm not usually a good conversationalist. I haven't had enough practice, especially since I have always spent most of my working time hacking in my lair instead of working socially. I started to practice things like this after the CFAR workshop in March, but put it on hold after getting married when I hurt my feet.

I'm finally recovered and can go outdoors again, so I spent this week practicing: three days of the hallway track at some conferences (plus moderating a discussion), two group classes, a social lunch, a party, hosting my cofounders for hacking, and a few video calls. I'm not completely socially exhausted--yeah, I threw the "introvert" label out of my identity a while ago--but I'm also not going to the second party tonight.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

It's been almost six months since I published The Motivation Hacker, my book on how to get yourself to want to do what you always wanted to want to do. Here's what surprised me.

Sales (updates: First Year Book Sales, Second Year Book Sales, Fourth Year Book Sales)

I use a site called PredictionBook to compare my private guesses to reality for things like this. It helps me be less overconfident. I took a brutal calibration beating on my predictions for how many copies I'd sell in the first six months:

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

For a few months in the beginning of 2012, the only exercise I got was doing 10-20 sets of pull-ups a day. I was hacking nonstop on the Skritter iOS app, and I decided to save gym time and just see how many I could do. I had tried sporadically forever (included weighted pull-ups and other silly things) to increase my max pull-ups, but from my untrained max of 13, I could never get past 15. Then Yoni suggested greasing the groove: do lots of easy sets throughout the day.

I tried doing 20 sets of 10 for 8 days, then rested 5 days and tested my max. Twenty! Well, all that other training must have sucked if it only takes a week to up one's max that much. I figured I was getting weaker at all my other lifts, but I didn't care, because over the next couple months at ten sets a day (eventually growing to sets of 16), I raised my max to 26.

Then I didn't do any exercise for six weeks, since I got busy with moving to the Human Hacker House. I tested my max pull-ups, and they had gone back down to around 20. Okay, lost some short-term gains there, I thought; let's see what else I lost, since I haven't done any other exercises for six months.

But my one-mile run was somehow 14 seconds faster than my previous plateau, and my bench press was 15 lbs higher than ever before, and my other lifts were about as good as they had been. Huh?

Why did my fitness and strength go up when all I was doing was pull-ups? I still don't know. (Do you?) But I just realized that even though I can't install a pull-up bar in this apartment, I can hang towels from door railing and do towel pull-ups!

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

These are the three plants I have out of my 99 things. I went to a plant nursery and bought them after my friend David pointed me to this TED talk: How to Grow Fresh Air in which three plants are recommended for not only producing all the fresh air you need, but also filtering out almost all air pollutants.

They didn't have a money plant, so I bought a rubber plant instead. Technically you're supposed to have a bunch of each of these plants per person. Well, whatever. They have funny names, live indoors with no maintenance and no direct sunlight, are difficult to kill, and might be making the air a little cleaner.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I was thinking of 1) setting something up where I could monitor my breath rate while working at my computer and 2) using that to train myself to breathe slower. What do you think--is this useful? What are good solutions for tracking breath rate? What would be an ideal breath rate be?

I already know that I can sustain breathing at once per minute, but it takes a lot of concentration. Is it even healthy to breathe that slowly, or would thrice a minute be better? Will it work to train myself to always breathe this way?

Update 2013-10-12: at a party, my friend Jonathan Toomim measured my Mayer wave resonance frequencies to determine at which breath rate I got the biggest amplitude boost on the Mayer wave and the most increased oxygenated bloodflow to the brain: around nine seconds per breath. Now, whether this means anything in terms of increased health, performance, or affect--he admits it's still unclear. But it's pretty cool.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Yesterday, I went down to the Institute for the Future for a workshop on "extreme learning". There were many diverse people in there, and we spent the day talking about learning, education, and school, and how we as futuristic learners could see things going in 2023.

I had some good conversations, but the thing that struck me the most was how much I felt like I was back in school for a day. There were large- and small-group discussions, presentations, brainstorming assignments--and the young people were taking tons of notes! It was funny to me, because I had come to talk about how bad school had ended up being for my attitude towards learning.

They asked what extreme learning meant to me. It's a bit sad, but to me, it's just learning, but where you remember it later. Naturally I talked about spaced repetition as the antidote for the in-one-semester-and-out-the-other paradigm of education, but I was surprised to be the only one talking about it.

The highlight of the day was playing Throw Trucks With Your Mind during lunch, since one of the extreme learners, Lat Ware, had brought two laptops and Neuroskies to demo it. I was surprised by how well it worked compared to some of the other bio-control stuff I'd tried. Lat has done his math well.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

During the hike up King's Peak (wild bachelor party, I know), I was a lithe gecko gliding up the trail. When going down, though, I trudged too hard, too long in thin-soled shoes. Should we stop? I kept asking myself. No, we're almost there, and the guys pine for Subway.

To the mauling my poor footbones received that day, concatenate a wedding and two weeks of hoofing around China. The pain worsened the more time I spent on my feet. I had ironically just started a Beeminder for spending more time on my feet, thinking that I'd be healthy and use one of the standing desks.

It's been two months, and every time I push it, pain pushes back. I suppose I'll just have to rest longer. Now I'm attempting to see how little I can stand. Sometimes I can spend less than half an hour on my feet in a day.

I might be more susceptible to stress fractures having previously injured my feet last summer running a half marathon way too fast on only two months of training. From my book: "My right foot was a smoldering chorizo mash, and my left foot was an adorable Angora rabbit with all its bones replaced by thorns. ... I could hardly walk for four days, and it was another week before I could make the half mile to the grocery store to buy food, so I was living on meat sticks, dark chocolate, and tinned oysters for six days. It was twelve days before my left foot stopped hurting when standing." Yes, this is familiar.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

A while ago I was working with Yoni on Telepath, a project to make your laptop do passive machine learning on your emotional state. It would know how you were feeling, record it for your Quantified Self purposes, and even correlate your moods with your at-computer activities. It might even be able to measure and correlate fluctuations in your cognitive performance.

How? It would look at your keystrokes, your mouse movements, your open applications, the light level, what music you were listening to, and more. It would listen. It would even look at you: with the webcam, it can get your heart rate and heart-rate variability, check your posture, look at your expression, notice when you're looking at the screen and when you're away, and more. There's a ton of signal here. If we can be clever about processing it, we don't need to ever ask you what's going on. It would go way beyond RescueTime or manual experiential sampling.

The project is on hold, because it's hard to do machine learning good enough on all those sources of data, and we got busy hacking on other things. But a few people were asking me about the personal logging part of it, since Stephen Wolfram has demonstrated that keylogging is cool, so last week I open-sourced the keylogger. You can now get the Telepath Logger on GitHub if you are running Mac OSX, or you can download a prebuilt version here.

It currently records keypresses, mouse movements, window and document switches, light levels, accelerometry (if you have a sudden motion sensor), and, optionally, webcam photos. My version also really beeps at me when I type bad-writing adverbs and plays the drums whenever the accelerometer notices sharp motion, which I find hilarious, but which is not enabled by default. All the log files are stored locally and it doesn't do any networking, but it's not encrypted, so if someone had access to your computer, they could also try to inefficiently dig through your typing history for the interesting parts.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I wrote this as a guest post on the Beeminder blog — comments can live there.

It’s dark. Warm. Safe. You’re in bed, about to fall asleep. Pre-dream hallucinations of commanding a mighty bear army are playing across your sated mind. Zz — wait — what about that CrossFit Beeminder?!

You forgot. You got behind. You skipped CrossFit yesterday, but Beeminder said that was okay as long as you did it today instead. You meant to, but life happened. At this point, you think, “I am sumptuously swaddled in my favorite luxury bedding material, it’s late, and there is no way I’m going out in the street to do the workout-of-the-day in the dark, by myself, in my pajamas. And Beeminder will just charge me $5 this time. Okay, deal. Zzz.”

But I think there’s a better way to use Beeminder. When this happened to me, I didn’t even have to think about what to do; I just found myself out there grunting my medicine ball against a telephone pole and jumprope-sprinting into gloomy rosebushes. [1] It wasn’t even worth considering losing my wager over the tiny matter of some physical discomfort. What wager? Not money — just the certainty that I will always do what I promise myself I will do.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Chloe and I dated for six years. For three years*, we were long-distance. For five years, starting five months in, I was spelling out W-I-L-L-Y-O-U-U-M-A-R-R-R-Y-M-E* encoded in the love letters I was writing her for use in my Surprise Ultimate Romantic Proposal Resulting In Sobbing Engagement. On June 22, we wedded, and it went better-than-perfectly. The wedding site Chloe and I built together has details and some photos. The two-week honeymoon in China was not for the faint of heart, weak of stomach, or narrow of eye, so we had a great time.

I am even happier than expected to be married. Chloe and I keep clinking our rings together as if activating some marriage superpower. I am all over the parenting books reading about optimal lifestyle and nutrition before pregnancy in preparation for producing experimental super-infants. Book, parenting, and marriage recommendations are all welcome.

I don't know which things I will put on this blog. Usually I just make new pages on nickwinter.net for everything I want to either share or record for myself. We'll see how the SETT approach of presenting content compares.